In the sixth century, a Roman named Boethius, in prison awaiting execution, wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy. In 2000, a Londoner named Alain de Botton wrote a book called The Consolations of Philosophy, designed to help us in our more ordinary woes - what you might call the unhappy preoccupations of comfortable people: loneliness, anxiety, unpopularity, disappointment and the success of our friends.

The poet W.S. Graham once wrote, "It is almost embarrassing to be alive alone." But de Botton makes it almost chic. Besides, he writes with such discreet intimacy - always confiding, sometimes advising but never berating - his readers can enjoy the notion or delusion but at any rate, the consolation, that in their solitude they are not alone.

In de Botton's works, it's not exactly the philosophies he describes that console us. It's the proof he offers that history's great and good suffered similar small pangs and tremors. Marcus Aurelius, too, was misunderstood.

Typically, de Botton's works are a curious, charming combination of diary, commonplace book and essay. In a chapter, or even a paragraph, he will move from an embarrassing personal anecdote to some illustrious quotation to a reflection on the mores - the dreams and assumptions - of our time.

So, in the first chapter of The Art of Travel, de Botton describes a bleak English winter, a travel brochure of Barbados, Huysman's novel about a Frenchman who spent his life at home and his own trip to Barbados where, in the middle of all that tropical perfection, he found his "mind revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm". He fought with his lover about who got the neatest creme caramel.

De Botton's followers may find this latest book, Status Anxiety, less engaging. For in Status Anxiety he gives up on the personal anecdote. Perhaps he's attempting a more rigorously philosophical attitude. Perhaps he has defined a trait he's unwilling to own.

He (de Botton) claimsthat our social standing these days depends upon financial achievements.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that in place of the everyman narrator, the self-deprecating, flawed, erudite, inquiring first person who served as our companion and representative in his other books, in Status Anxiety de Botton uses the presumptive "we".

Perhaps this wouldn't matter if we agreed with de Botton's argument, which is, after all, set out with characteristic wit and confidence. The book starts with a definition of status and status anxiety. He claims that our social standing these days depends upon financial achievements.

Since our self-estimation depends upon our social standing and it's hard to get rich, this has prompted status anxiety: "A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideas of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and self-respect."

Once we challenge the idea that status depends solely or even primarily on wealth, we may also lose patience with the claim that status anxiety is peculiarly the consequence of a ruthlessly meritocratic modern capitalist society.

For the pernicious worry that de Botton defines as status anxiety seems akin to the Renaissance concern with reputation and even the Classical obsession with fickle fortune.

In light of the apparent persistence of human concern with status, it's hard to credit de Botton's argument that in olden days peasants were happily free from anxiety about their social standing simply because they had no social standing. Of course, the fear of starvation may focus the mind, but even the poorest characters in Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale wish to own more ribbons than their neighbours.

Status Anxiety is more successful when de Botton turns from a discussion of causes, with historical examples, to a discussion of solutions. He recommends philosophy, art, politics, Christianity and bohemia - value systems that offer alternatives to the market economic idea of human worth.

In this second part of the book, de Botton cites, among others, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Dada and Arthur Schopenhauer. He also includes Punch cartoons: "I consider myself a passionate man, but a lawyer first"; "I usually wake up screaming at six-thirty, and I'm in the office by nine."

Here we find de Botton back on familiar territory in familiar form: quizzical, companionable, eclectic, brimming with odd facts and apt quotations. It may not be philosophy, but it is consoling.

Alain de Botton is a guest at an Age Dymocks Book Event on Tuesday evening at Melbourne Town Hall. For more information and bookings, phone 9660 8500.